


A Never-Ending Present and a Never-Ending Past

by PerpetuaLilium



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Aging, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Bittersweetness, Dreams, Dreamsharing, F/M, Hobbit Culture & Customs, M/M, Past Relationship(s), The Shire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:55:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23555683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PerpetuaLilium/pseuds/PerpetuaLilium
Summary: Sam Gamgee's dreams, after Frodo sails. (Canon-compliant)
Relationships: Frodo Baggins/Sam Gamgee, Rose Cotton/Sam Gamgee
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30





	A Never-Ending Present and a Never-Ending Past

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ArvenaPeredhel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArvenaPeredhel/gifts).



> This fic--about post-canon dream-sharing between Frodo and Sam--is inspired by a dream that I had myself, in which Frodo and Sam were characters having a conversation much along the lines of those they have here. I wrote this for my own birthday, so that I could gift it, hobbit-fashion, to a dear friend who's my main point of contact with the wider Tolkien fandom.
> 
> The relationships are canon-compliant--Sam is faithfully married to Rose Cotton throughout her life; Frodo wouldn't dream of being a homewrecker even from across the Sea--but it's not a het fic.
> 
> "Ú-elleth a ú-fíriel" means "Not [female] elf and yet not mortal woman".

_1._

Sam first began having Frodo dreams when Elanor was seven. He had had dreams about Frodo before, many times; but ‘the Frodo dreams’ were new, marked as they were by conversations with Frodo that did not resemble any they had had when Frodo had still been in Middle-earth.

At first, Frodo was only interested in assuring Sam that he was well; that little time had passed for him in the West, less, somehow, than had passed for Sam, just as in Lothlórien it had seemed like the days and nights were at once longer and shorter than they ought to have been. He asked after Sam and Sam told him about his growing family and his growing children; Elanor was the prettiest maidchild in the Shire, bound (Rosie said) to be a heartbreaker with other hobbit boys and girls, and Frodo and Rosie-lass were rough-and-tumble in their play, and a boy called Merry had just lately been born.

‘I wish you could be here to see ‘em, Mr Frodo,’ Sam said. ‘You’d be the best uncle any hobbit-child could wish.’

‘Life is long, Sam,’ said Frodo. ‘Many times you’ll wish for someone who is no longer with you—myself not least of all. But you were meant to fill your days, and love the future; I am in a never-ending present, that is also a never-ending past that does not move or change. You were meant to be whole and hale in the world of mortal Men; I cannot be so.’

‘I wonder if you ever could have been so,’ Sam said.

‘I think once upon a time perhaps I may have been; but once upon a time is not today,’ said Frodo. It was a morning-dream, in which Frodo’s voice faded in and out over the sound of Rosie’s teakettle; Frodo’s eyes were grey in the greyness of the morning and the greyness of the Sea that sundered him from Middle-earth and from the Shire.

‘Do you still hurt?’ Sam found himself asking, although he was not sure he had wanted to. ‘In March and October, the way you used to, like.’

‘I do,’ said Frodo. ‘The pain is easier to bear here, as much easier as the Ring became more difficult. But it has not gone away.’

‘Do you live? Are you happy?’

‘I do live. I am happy, after a fashion; there are food and song and play in the houses here, and I am living with Uncle Bilbo again, and I see Gandalf and Gildor and Elrond often; and Galadriel has seen her father again.’

Sam had read in the Red Book, in a portion that Bilbo had translated long ago, about Galadriel’s father; it was difficult for him to imagine that the Lady Galadriel had something as earthy-strong as a father, a Gaffer of her own, and it almost made him chuckle to think that Frodo had come to know such a person. But the dream was ending, and dawn was turning to day, and it was something Rosie said that made him laugh instead.

_2._

To say that Sam had a trying time moving forward with his life would have been to give him far too little credit. He and Rosie had a baker’s dozen of happy children almost all of whom would become famous in rhyme and proverb in the Shire, and he won each of his seven terms as Mayor of Michel Delving by a landslide. The dreams continued, and were a lifeline for Sam at certain points. One such point came when Rosie was very ill and Tom, their youngest, was still quite small. Rosie had taken ill swimming in the Bywater Pool with the children as she and Sam had when they themselves had been small; naked in the water, something had bitten her, and Sam had been assailed by memories of Weathertop and Shelob.

‘It’s a beautiful summer, Mr Frodo,’ he observed in the space that existed in his dreams. ‘Not like…well…’

‘No; not like it at all,’ Frodo said. ‘This is an ordinary life you’re leading, Sam; the life of the Shire as I did my best to save it for you. Try your best not to worry overmuch; when I was twenty I was bitten by a pike in a pond in Tookland, and I took ill from something in the water. I was better within the fortnight and I imagine Rosie will be as well; I remember that she is hale.’

‘She is at that,’ said Sam, proudly. ‘Tell me, Mr Frodo—is it summer where you are also?’

‘In this country the seasons are—not what they are in Middle-earth,’ said Frodo. ‘In my heart it is forever springtime; the seasons outside my heart change by place more than they change by time. I have left my house only rarely since I have been here. It’s like Rivendell was, when we first encountered it, when we first loved it—there is plenty to do at home, and I am healing.’

‘Well, there’s no place like home; that’s what I always say,’ said Sam. ‘But it’s for that reason I wish you were here, Mr Frodo; we all do. Rosie too, and the children; I tell ‘em all about you.’

‘If I were there,’ said Frodo, but then he trailed off; he sounded wistful and looked wistful; he looked up at the stars (suddenly in their dream-space they were in a boat under the stars), and started singing in one of the Elf-tongues.

> _A Elbereth! Gilthoniel,_
> 
> _Ú-elleth a ú-fíriel…_

‘How old are you?’ Sam asked once Frodo had trailed off from singing too. ‘Do you have birthdays in those parts?’

‘We do, after a fashion,’ said Frodo, ‘but it’s difficult to know how time passes. We celebrate them, more or less, as we care to; and the Elves instead celebrate the day of their begetting.’ Sam blushed a little at Frodo mentioning this. ‘I’ve celebrated my birthday seven times since I came here,’ Frodo finished.

‘You’re younger than I am, Mr Frodo!’ said Sam, having done the maths in his head.

‘So I am, Sam; and yet far older than I was,’ said Frodo. ‘I felt old, when I was sick on the days of Weathertop and Shelob; I felt old beyond old, when the burden of the Ring was in fact upon me. Do you feel old or young?’

‘I feel middle-aged,’ said Sam. ‘Which is worst, do you think?’

Frodo sighed heavily. ‘Which indeed,’ he said.

Now this was a dream early in the night; at about midnight Sam woke up from it and went to check up on Rosie, who was in one of the guest bedrooms so as to convalesce. She was feeling better; her fever had come down and she said her head didn’t hurt so much. He wiped some sweat from her brow and went back to their own room, feeling lonely as he went back to bed. His sleep for the rest of the night was dreamless, except for an odd half-waking dream near dawn, in which Gandalf and Bombadil were singing to him.

That had been shortly after his visit to Gondor, during which Young Tom Cotton had stood in for him as Deputy Mayor, the way Frodo had once for Will Whitfoot and, long before, Clotho Sackville had for Valdemar Bolger. Strider had inquired of him and Rosie after the children, many of whom he had met, a few years earlier, visiting the Shire himself, or at least coming as far as the Brandywine Bridge. Upon returning to Hobbiton Sam and Rosie found that their children had done a better job of managing Bag End than they were liable to do themselves; he had found himself loving them even more, as anybody might have been expected to, that being the case.

Soon enough Rosie had recovered from what ailed her, and by the end of that summer she had taken to the Bywater Pool again, while Sam sat in the Green Dragon with Tom; sometimes Merry and Pippin would visit there also, and when they came they were always objects of local notice, fine lordlings like those you might find in foreign parts. Once or twice that August Bree-hobbits came, and brought news of the affairs of the North-kingdom. It was also the case sometimes that Elanor came in and sat with them; hobbit-lasses were more liable to come into the pubs than they once had been, and not just as barmaids. Sam, ever one to stand a bit more on custom except when it came to this daughter of his, wondered if perhaps that was a Bree-land way of doing things that Shire folk had picked up.

He spoke a bit of one of the Elf-languages these days, in the manner of speaking that one could get from books; there were a few of Elrond’s folk still left in Rivendell, Queen Arwen’s brothers among them, and once or twice when he and Rosie and the children would go out on rambles through the Shire they would find a little band making its way to the Havens. He recognized well the gleam in Elanor’s eyes when she had seen an Elf for the first time—was it now twenty years before, or even longer?

_3._

When Sam was about eighty years old, black dreams came. There was a stench to them, whereas the dreams of usual and restful sleep were, for him, all sounds and images. He told Rosie about them; Rosie had read most of the Red Book several times over, as had Elanor and Goldilocks, and they understood about what had happened to him when he was young. ‘You ought to see if you can lay hand on any kingsfoil,’ Elanor said to him.

‘It grows all over,’ Rosie said. ‘We thought it was a weed once, if you remember?’

‘Of course,’ said Sam. ‘But…’ He paused. Rosie, Elanor, and Goldilocks looked up at him expectantly. Rosie, her own face careworn and aging, had been in wonderful health of mind and body ever since the incident in the pool, as indeed Sam had been until recent weeks. ‘I do wonder,’ Sam said at last, ‘if the King might come North again someday.’

‘He has a seneschal in Norbury, doesn’t he?’ Elanor asked.

‘The best healers have gone over the Sea,’ Goldilocks observed with uncharacteristic graveness.

That night in the dream-space, which was now a long pebbly strand against which grey waves were crashing, Frodo reminded Sam of something that Gandalf had said long before. ‘Things like the Ring have a way of sticking in your mind more when you get towards the end of your days,’ he said. ‘You would be about ninety years old there, Sam?’

‘Not quite,’ said Sam. ‘Eighty. I’ve plenty of grandchildren, and I think I have a good few years left in me yet.’

‘I believe you do, Sam,’ said Frodo, ‘and I might be wrong; but you might want to watch out as you get older for dwelling on things more than you would have thought.’

‘I will,’ said Sam, sitting on a piece of driftwood and looking out over the Sea that he had only seen two or three times in his waking life, from the high towers.

_4._

The black dreams came and went; as time went on they became more frequent but, somehow, less dangerous and frightening in themselves. Sam and Rosie’s progeny grew and thrived; when he was eighty-nine he went out to the Free Fair, old but hale, one of the roundest hobbits in the Westfarthing, and was elected to a record seventh term as Mayor, having already beaten the previous record, that of a hobbit who had died of a pleurisy midway through his sixth. Rosie, for her part, spent her days writing and rewriting bits and bobs from the Red Book—her hand was firmer than Sam’s, her spelling and grammar better—and managing Bag End’s budget and inheritances. The children now were grown or nearly so. Sam felt the weariness of a well-spent old age.

Although a Counsellor of the North-kingdom, Sam did little in his last term as Mayor other than the traditional duties of presiding at banquets and keeping the mail running. In each of his prior terms he had been to Norbury once or twice; in this last term he merely sent letters, in Elf-script as fine as he and Rosie could make it, when his presence was requested. He had only stood for his final term, really, because had he not, it was likely that Rolo Proudfoot would have; and Rolo Proudfoot was a cussed old bumbler if there ever was one.

Sam at last stepped down from his office when his oldest child was fifty-five and his youngest was thirty-four. He had by that point almost a dozen grandchildren, and he was older and fatter and, during the day and on most nights, happier than ever. He almost forgot about Gandalf and Frodo’s feeling that his history with the Ring would weigh on him more as his life wore down. But after five years of happy retirement the dreams came back worse than ever—spiders, Ringwraiths, awful skittering things in the ghost-wreathed dark—and he felt a blow very near his roots. Rosie had taken ill again, and such healers as there were among Shire-folk told her and Sam that she was not long for this world.

Rosie died on Mid-Year’s Day in the year 1482 of the Shire Reckoning. Two days later, Sam dreamed that it was he, not Frodo, who had been stabbed under Weathertop and stung in Cirith Ungol; he dreamed also of himself carrying the Ring and being tempted thereby, and it surprised him how heartsick he became at that dream-memory. He sought Frodo in the dream-space, and saw him resting under a tree outside a well-appointed house in the Elf-fashion, looking happy, looking older.

‘Hello, Sam,’ Frodo said, stirring a little. He smiled at Sam, and Sam awoke.

Sam had made up his mind what he was going to do. It was obvious to him, and he needed no dreams or dream-space to tell him. Círdan the Shipwright, they said, still lingered at the Grey Havens; once in a very long while Sam still found one or a few of Elrond’s people in the White Downs or the Green Hill Country. Sam was wounded after all, and he resolved not to let that wound fester any longer. When Rosie had lived, there had been no question at all in his mind that he would stay by her side for as long as he possibly could; he had heard that the Lady Galadriel’s husband had stayed in the Golden Wood when she had passed over Sea, and he did not hold with that. But now that Rosie had passed somewhere else, somewhere beyond—somewhere Sam could not, at least not yet, follow her—it hardly needed stating that he would pass somewhere else too. He would go to the Sea, to the Havens, to the firth of Lune once more, and he would pass into the West, the last, as would be said in after years, of the ringbearers of song and story. And there under the trees he would sit and talk with Frodo, the master and friend he had loved once in another age of the world.


End file.
